Super Mosquitoes May Be Created By Insecticide-Treated Nets

Ugandan villagers are taught the importance of the use mosquito nets in the fight against the spread of malaria. (Photo by Sallyforthwit)

By Marissa FessendenEvolution’s mechanisms keep life on Earth mutable, adaptable and alive. But it also presents a stumbling block when we humans attempt to control nature. When confronted with penicillin, bacteria develop resistance to the formerly miraculous drug and its successors. When challenged repeatedly with the same potent herbicides, weeds become dreaded superweeds. Now, our efforts to drive back malaria-carrying mosquitoes have created bloodsuckers unaffected by insecticides.

Since 2000, deaths from malaria worldwide have fallen by 47 percent, according to the World Health Organization’s World Malaria Report. Much of that success in sub-Saharan Africa, where the brunt of that toll is exacted, can be attributed to the use of insecticide-treated nets. The Guardian reports that access to such nets in the region rose from 3 percent in 2002 to 49 percent in 2013. The article, written in December, states that the WHO report "estimates that 214m long-lasting insecticidal nets will have been delivered to the area by the end of this year, bringing the total number distributed in the area over the past two years to 427m."

That kind of firepower gets met by the inevitable mosquito march for survival. The malaria-carrying mosquito species Anopheles coluzzii has apparently interbred with another species Anopheles gambiae. The hybrids carry genes that give them resistance to the most commonly used insecticides, reports Arielle Duhaime-Ross for The Verge.

Alarmingly, the rise of insecticide-treated nets in Mali coincides neatly with the development of this resistance, researchers found. They published their work in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A.